The Week

Jakob Schiller:LeConte Elementary School Principal Patricia Saddler helps funnel students out of class and onto their busses after school Monday afternoon while Iris Privitte, a third-grader at LeConte, gives third and fourth grade teacher Maria Carriedo a hug..

News

Last week, Berkeley Unified School District produced one of those math brain teasers during this spring’s overhaul of its principal corps. Question: if Berkeley Unified has three elementary school principal slots to fill—at Rosa Parks, Oxford, and John Muir—and fills one of them, how many elementary school principal slots does the district have to fill? Answer: three.
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Calling Berkeley’s fire marshal “a bully,” the owner of a West Berkeley warehouse said he was considering taking legal action to halt city-mandated fines and expenses that have cost him over $100,000 in the past month.
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With the threat of union action looming, the University of California and the American Federation of State, County And Municipal Employees (AFSCME) have agreed to a system-wide contract for UC’s 7,300 service workers across the state. The new three-year contract runs through January 2008.
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One month after an alleged alcohol-related hazing incident brought police attention to UC Berkeley fraternities, the university announced this week a “ban on alcohol consumption at all events hosted by campus fraternities and sororities.”
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UC Berkeley announced Monday their architectural choices to design two major projects for the southeastern part of the campus: the retrofit of Memorial Stadium and the new academic commons building for the law and business schools.
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With the Berkeley Unified School District locked in a contract dispute with teachers, in part over requests for increased money, BUSD board directors continue this week with the task of trying to balance an already shaky budget.
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The ever-controversial density bonus, proposed revisions to the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Ordinance and South Berkeley’s “Flying Cottage” top the agendas of the city’s land use panels this week.
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Friday’s Daily Planet will feature an expanded Letters to the Editor and Commentary section which will include the volumes of submissions we’ve received regarding BUSD teachers’ work to rule action.
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To experience Berkeley at its civic and civil best, you can’t beat the spring house tour of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. Just staging the event involves nearly 200 volunteers. That’s not counting the homeowners who open their residences to the public for an afternoon. Equally impressive is the way the tour brings out a general graciousness that’s often lacking in daily Berkeley life.
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In Michelle Carter’s Writing in the Public Context class at San Francisco State, it isn’t enough that I have spent an hour a week for 13 weeks walking with my housemate, Willie, down to Doug’s B.B.Q. and back, snapping photographs along the way, transferring them onto my computer and sending them off to my fellow classmates. I have to come up with a final project that includes a 15-minute presentation in front of the class. This assignment has worried me since the start of the semester.
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When opponents of library use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology testified at Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission meeting in March, 2005, one of the commissioners repeatedly asked whether the industry was using this library in particular, or libraries in general, to promote RFID. A letter sent by a major book industry group to members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors last summer shows that the answer is a resounding yes.
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The 23rd annual Celebration of Old Roses will be held Sunday, May 15 from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the El Cerrito Community Center on Moeser at Ashbury. Sponsored by the Heritage Roses Group, the event is free.
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A planning document for the UC Berkeley campus has won an unusual accolade. The university’s Landscape Heritage Plan is receiving a Webby Award this year. Sometimes referred to as the “Oscars of the Internet,” the Webbys honor high quality and innovative website design.
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The story of one of Berkeley’s most important early families, and the history of a National Landmark building in Yosemite built to honor one of the Sierra Club’s patriarchs, will be featured this Thursday evening, May 12, in the fourth lecture in the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s monthly series, “Hidden Lodges of Berkeley and Beyond.”
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Students, faculty, and parents at Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School welcomed a new dendro-American citizen to our town in a brief ceremony Friday morning, April 29, National Arbor Day. A 35-foot northern red oak had been planted in the schoolyard to replace a senior elm, removed because it was dying.
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With no end in sight to either the impasse in contract negotiations or the ongoing work-to-rule action, Berkeley teachers held an hour long demonstration in front of the Berkeley Unified School Administration Building Tuesday afternoon.
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Eight years ago, in an act that Willard Middle School Vice Principal Thomas Orput calls a “total fiasco,” the Berkeley Unified School District painted over the Telegraph Avenue mural on the school gymnasium’s outside wall without contacting the artists.
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Prisoners in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and Iraq have been hooded, isolated, humiliated, injured, made to feel hopeless and close to death. Mark Danner, UC Berkeley journalism professor, says such treatment is systemic, a flagrant violation of rules of war and morality and the fault of “policy makers in the department of justice, policy makers including Professor (John) Yoo, policy makers in the Department of Defense (and) policy makers in the White House.”
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Back in February, Ashawn Walker was smoking cigarettes, guzzling down soda, eating junk food and unbeknownst to her, two months pregnant. Now, with the help of a Berkeley program for African American moms-to-be, she’s drinking water, eating fruit, and keeping her distance from nicotine.
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With a draft plan in hand for the cleanup of contaminated soil and groundwater at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is calling for public input on the proposal.
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In recent weeks both the San Francisco Chronicle and this newspaper have featured essays and letters lambasting the “arrogance” of UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s efforts to affirm the value of diversity, castigating black leaders and parenting skills a nd accusing blacks of using the “victim card” instead of acting more like Asians. And just how do Asians behave?
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Sorry to continue to be a bother about this, but I continue to be puzzled over the details of how Oakland’s schools got taken over by the state, and what needs to be done to get the schools back in Oakland’s hands.
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Tim O’Brien was 21 years old when he was sent to fight in Vietnam. More than two decades later, he wrote the literary masterpiece The Things They Carried. The book describes a handful of soldiers in Vietnam, and the things they carried—a girlfriend’s panties, a Cherokee hunting hatchet, comic books, illustrated bibles, dope, cigarettes, condoms, photographs, chewing gum and so forth. For years, O’Brien carried inside him the things his fellow soldiers carried, before setting them down on the page.
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I was sorry to read the public meeting of the Library Board of Trustees last Wednesday characterized as resembling a “high school pep rally.” I have attended public meetings when important issues that meant a great deal to the attendees, and this one was another good example of democracy in action. (In San Francisco Public Library during the fees for computer service fracas, in Oakland, when a Military Academy was foisted on the city despite the standing room only meetings and negative votes by Boards of Education of Oakland and Alameda County). The Berkeley Public Library Board of Trustees President, Laura Anderson quietly, but firmly determined that everyone who wanted to speak, would do so. Surely there were outcries, clapping and some booing, but all were heard. It was the substance, the sharing of information and concerns, the search for solutions that mattered more than the formal manners that often suppress what needs to be aired.
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The City Council voted 5-4 to burn the West Berkeley Plan. It wasn’t worded like that, of course. On April 19, they approved funding to begin an “incremental” evaluation of the Plan by studying changing the zoning of Ashby and Gilman west of San Pablo from industrial to commercial, to bring in more sales tax revenue from regional retail.
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I would like to comment on the announcement of the publication of The Frontlines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Daily Planet, April 26-28). Not having read the book, I cannot say anything about its contents, but the subject of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War deserves something more than the glowing pro-Stalinist whitewash usually presented in such volumes—and in Brenneman’s puff piece.
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Angela Davis came back home to Berkeley for her birthday. No, not that Angela Davis, but her niece, Angela Eisa Davis, known as Eisa to her family, fans and friends. The former Berkeley High School graduate, class of 1988, left Berkeley for a degree at Harvard followed by an master’s of fine arts from the Actors Studio Drama School, in Manhattan.
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The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Musical Director Kent Nagano, will present the world premiere of Manzanar—An American Story, a semi-staged oratorio for orchestra, chorus and narrators, on Tuesday May 10 at Zellerbach Hall.
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Opinion

Editorials

Thanks to tips from the Daily Planet’s theater writers, we spent two evenings last weekend enjoying dramatic presentations, both of which did exactly what they were supposed to do: illuminated real life in ways we might not have expected. Parents like us who raised children born in the often tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s sometimes wonder if the kids in that cohort were helped or harmed by their exposure to the crosscurrents of political and cultural change which were sweeping the country at the time. Judging by what we saw in these performances, the kids turned out pretty well.
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Wild rumors that the City of Berkeley is about to sell its citizens down the river have been sweeping the city ever since the University of California opened the discussion of what its future plans for growth might be. We’ve had anguished voicemail messages from citizens who’ve picked up crumbs of information ever since last fall. Neither the much trumpeted City of Berkeley lawsuit challenging U.C.’s environmental impact report on its latest Long Range Development Plan nor the city’s threats that it would finally begin to collect sewer and parking fees from the university assuaged these anxieties.
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